Science Projects

It has been a very quiet week.  Not much to report and the only pictures on my camera are the science project Jeff had due today.  We've known about it since before Christmas Break, but we waited until Saturday night to get it done.  We've been hanging around Brett too long, and we now feel that we do our very best work at the last minute.

For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of school science projects, may I recommend a book I wish I had 15 years ago:

I don't know how much it's going for these days, but it's worth every penny of whatever they're charging for it.  I ought to start giving these away as baby gifts.  In the long term, it'll prove much more useful to a family than any package of diapers.

The project Jeff selected?  Yeast fermentation.  Here's what we did.  (Bryce, the pictures are all yellow.  I know they're not supposed to look like that, but without you, I don't know how to  make them not be yellow.)

You take two water bottles and fill them with water and yeast.  To the first bottle, you add 2 tablespoons of sugar, and then you tape a balloon on top of each bottle.  Here's what happened:

After 5 minutes

After 15 minutes

After 30 minutes

 

 

 

After 60 minutes

It turns out that the yeast breaks the sugar down into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  The CO2 is then collected in the balloon.  Cool, huh?  I can't wait to see what grade we get.